Main Street was one of two Steam Era stations in Richmond. A much larger Broad Street Station proved to be too costly to operate, as well as having a convoluted one-way traffic pattern that cost trains an additional half hour in platforming and departing. There's not much room for expansion at Main.

Everything is elevated, more complex and constrained. Major expansion of rail capacity will be costly to put in place, and costly to maintain. It is unlikely that Main Street Station will ever be made adequate to accommodate all the trains that should be Richmond’s future. However, high-yield incremental improvements can be, and should be, made to enable the routing of some additional trains to, from, and through Main Street Station. Given what the State of Virginia has spent on restoration of Amtrak Virginia service to Norfolk -- which we heartily applaud -- a similar amount of money, judiciously allocated to rail infrastructure capacity enhancements, could bring additional trains to center-city-Richmond. This is not an unreasonable, nor unrealistic, undertaking. A meaningful allocation should be included in the next round of State rail infrastructure funding.

I forget which railroad ran its passenger trains right past Main on tracks that had no platforms, to get to Broad. Either Seaboard Coast Line or Amtrak saw some advantages of building a new, less complex station on cheaper land with better access to the highways. But at the time, nobody expected the southern corridors to take off the way they have.

The Henrico station is an orphan. Amtrak owns it but has no money to spend. Henrico hosts it, but has never seized the opportunity to claim it as a “signature gateway” asset. The Richmond Region was persuaded by the City to support Main Street Station -- before anybody bothered to understand the rail access challenges there. The State says “we don’t do stations”. Meanwhile, the 300-car RVR parking lot regularly overflows with 325 or more. Passengers take taxis (which don’t want to accommodate them) to and from a near-by park-and ride-lot (no courtesy van service). VDOT has only recently, and apparently reluctantly, agreed to put up a stop light. This is the highest volume Amtrak station in Virginia.

Proper passenger facilities matter. The emerging Quincy corridor in Illinois has a few classic Burlington stations left, as well as newer buildings in Naperville, Mendota, Kewanee, and Galesburg. Station staffing is uneven. The well-restored Macomb station is closed at weekends. Apparently some transients used the station as a shelter, and damaged a rest room. As a consequence, the large crowds of weekend travelers must stand outside until train time, a situation in which global warming is undoubtedly welcome in winter and annoying in summer.